A Tree on Fire (10 page)

He stopped the car on Bluestone Ridge, tasting silence of the indeterminate season, spring emerging from a brittle rat-trap of winter. Air was clearing over Catham and the flattish patchwork of fields by the coast, and he imagined slugbreakers coming in on slow rebounds from the vast level sea, flaking phosphorous breaking on shrub and gravel, as he had seen it so many times when walking on empty bereft beaches without a shilling in his pocket, waiting till dusk before starting the twenty miles home if he didn't get a lift, back to Enid and the kids with their reasonable wants and he unable to do much about them.

Buds were sharpening on hawthorn hedges, and when the wind stopped drifting it was almost warm. Below a wood on the opposite hillside a tractor crawled along the furrows, breaking silence, undisturbing under the clouds. Every so often he felt it was time to make a change in his life, yet he distrusted this as the promptings of chaos. To swing violently onto another course was certain to kill your work for a while, and at the moment it was going well. He was deep in the industry of it, and only questioned it after some heart-shaking quarrel at home that set him to wonder whether he was living in the best possible way for his work. Such quarrels fragmented his confidence, and that was always bad. Yet without such threats, he smiled in the sweet headclearing air, the very force behind his work would rot.

He joined the main road and dropped two hundred feet towards Catham where it was raining again, a steady drift of fine spray against slate roofs and cobbled streets. It was almost as quiet as the countryside when he drove under the railway-bridge towards newer houses sprawled on the far side of town. She was in, he saw, even before turning into the crescent. Smoke came from the chimneypots, and her Hillman Minx stood outside. He could smell the sea as he stood to lock his car, grains of wet sand crossing the flats from Toddle Fen. There'd been no thought of coming to see her, yet in fleeing from home he'd landed without thought on her doorstep.

He hurried up the gravel, a tall figure bending from wind hitting the back of his head. Curtains flicked at the window, and the fancy glass panelling of the door swung open before a hand came out of his pockets to knock.

‘Hello, Albert!'

He stepped by her into the hall: bookcase, holding
Principles of Banking, Practical Knowledge for All, Complete Ornithology
and a few deadbeat thrillers. Then an umbrella-stand, mirror and coat-rack. ‘I thought you'd be out, so I came to see you.'

Her laugh stayed. ‘As long as you aren't disappointed.'

‘I can't tell yet.' He pulled her to him, tall and buxom, long brown hair falling away. ‘Breadwinner in?'

Her brown eyes opened wide. ‘He's gone birdwatching. Heard of some wild geese mating near the Wash. Went out at four this morning – instead of going to the bank.'

‘I hope they take their time over it.' Sitting by the coal fire in the living-room she asked how things were at home. ‘Wonderful,' he said. ‘I couldn't betray my wife if everything weren't perfect between us. That's why I haven't been to see you lately. Too many rows.'

She was thirty-eight, a schoolteacher, strictly career woman and to hell with her husband when it came to a sweet knock or two on the side. Handley had met her in the bank on a Saturday morning, dropped one of his cheque-books, and who could ever say whether it was accident or design? If a handkerchief's the only thing a man'll pick up that a woman drops, he thought, a cheque-book's the only thing a woman will remind a man that he's dropped, whether it's her husband or no. He stood on the bank step admiring the beautiful seventeenth-century houses round about like a tourist from the Home Counties. She tapped his shoulder: ‘You seem to have dropped this.'

‘So I have,' he smiled familiarly. ‘How would I have got through the weekend without it?
I
only found it this morning, and was getting used to affluence already.' Large brown eyes looked back at him, lips opened in a smile to reveal teeth that went well with ear-rings and fur coat. Mrs Joan Quickie in his mind's eye, until she gave her real name.

‘If you did find it,' she said, though not too certain of his seriousness, ‘don't you think it would be a good idea to give it back?'

The chill autumn went through to his glum face: ‘Would you like to come for a drink with me so that I can think about it?' – offering her a cigarette while she made up her mind.

‘No,' she said.

‘Then let's talk standing here. I'm very much attracted to you. Handley's my name. I always am to someone who wants me to go straight. As a matter of fact I took it from the pocket of an old suit this morning before sending it to the cleaners. Did you think I'd really knocked it off?'

‘Not altogether,' she said.

‘Let's walk along. We're nearly at the Queen's Head. Good fire in there. You were coming out of the manager's office. Been to get an overdraft?'

‘The bank manager's my husband,' she laughed, walking a few steps.

‘I've never known a bank manager to have such a personable wife,' he said.

‘You live and learn,' she said as they went in for a drink.

‘Now and again,' he responded, taking her arm.

Her name, after all, was Joan, but Mallinson, though she was quick enough when it came to the point, which it did when he thought to call.

‘I'm glad to see you, though I don't suppose I should say so to someone like you. Where have you been this last month?'

He took off his jacket and stood by the shelf. ‘Painting. Finished a few things.' The morning papers were thrown over the padded velvet sofa. ‘I saw that article,' she said. ‘I don't suppose your wife felt too good about it.'

‘Let's not talk about that. Is there any coffee?'

‘I'll get some.' Before she could move he held her to him. ‘You had a quarrel,' she said, a teasing smile.

‘Not exactly. The pots didn't fly.' He took off her glasses and set them on the shelf.

‘But
you
did,' she said, ‘here.'

‘Shut up, and let me love you. I know you're a happily married woman, but I'm a happily married man, so it's not sinful.' The day lay quiet over the house and whole road, keeping the world silent for them. Only the antique clock wrung out its bomb ticks from the shelf above. His hands were up under the back of her sweater, flattening between shoulder-blades, while her mouth writhed around his face, opened over his moustache and lips. ‘Come and see me more often,' she said. ‘You can always phone to check whether it's all right.'

He pressed her full breasts against him. ‘Tell me that when I'm about to leave' – clearing his throat. Her mouth stopped him talking, an ether mask going over his windpipe and set for the silence and blackout of love. ‘Let's go upstairs.'

He forgot his lust to the extent of noticing the bedroom furniture: the bad taste opulence of wardrobes and dressing-tables marked His and Hers (how can he suspect anything with those staring at him on coming to bed every night?) and orange eiderdown and low head-boarded bed, round piano-stools with powderpuff tops, and white sheep's-wool mats that, when barefoot, made you look as though you had no feet. The odour of bedroom cold lingered through sudden gasfire heat.

Her sweater came up and over, face flushed as if at the sight of what Handley could see. It was no love match, for she was like the sea, and Handley the little boy with his finger in the polder-hole. He wanted to take it easy, slowly, woo her, but the rush was on her, and therefore him. It's not that when we're in bed I try to make her come, he'd sometimes reflected after it was finished, so much as me trying to hold myself back. It was good, sweet, the whole point of the world, but like that, in complete abandon, would last thirty seconds before his explosion while hers was still a low rumble in the distance, a few spots of sail or seagull wing on the far horizon of a becalmed and enchanted sea. While loving her as both deserved, hand under buttocks and one around neck, kisses fronting between them, he breathed the cool air hard, counted up to ten, felt his impossible drilltip about to explode into a million diamonds deep in her, so tried to think of all the villages in Lincolnshire beginning with the letter N, and when that ran out tried to think of the names of individual seas in the world, stations on the railway up from London, every tree he knew, all spring flowers. He occasionally distrusted such a millstone system, yet it held them back from a headlong rush till they reached the calms and shallows, out of which he became an uninhibited savage and she a fishwife who came with ease and speed, Eddystone in a storm-blind sea, she upswamping as if to put out that top light with a hiss of fire and water, and a groan of triumphant chaos.

Handley wondered when he could decently get up and look for a cigarette. He kissed her and risked it, his long trouserless legs stretched white over the orange bedside. She pulled him back. ‘How can you be in such a hurry when it was so good?' But her voice was calm, and she smiled in the dim light. In spite of all hurry, she'd drawn the curtains and locked the door, and he wondered whether in the opposite house they weren't curious as to who had died. If someone came over and politely asked he wouldn't be able to tell them at the moment.

He gave her a cigarette, flicked the lighter near her face. ‘I lead a dull life,' she said, ‘as a schoolteacher in a small Lincolnshire town.'

‘You were born here.'

‘What difference does that make?' The better they found it the more discontented she felt afterwards. So where will it ever end? he wondered.

‘You work hard. Why complain?'

‘I am complaining, though.'

‘I suppose you'd like us to go away together, drop everything and fly south to a romantic life in London or Majorca? I'm not twenty any more. I don't even love you.'

‘But I love you.'

‘You're lucky then. I wish to God I did, a piece of forked lightning come down from heaven and blasted me in two, one part glued to stay and the other wanting to go with some woman to the far side of the moon and rot there in a vile state of love. Fine. Randy and dandy, swoony and loony, a leper between the sun and moon. I say no thanks to it, until it hits me, and then I'll have no say in it at all. When I'm not in love I can paint great pictures as big as a wall, but if I was in love I'd paint bloody miniatures and choke on them, or do futile pieces of wire-sculpture that I'd fall down in and strangle to death.'

‘How about that coffee?' he said, putting an arm round her when they got downstairs. ‘Perhaps I'm dead inside, a wood-yard of seasoned timber nobody wants.'

‘You're not,' she said. ‘But let's go away for a few days, to London or the South coast. We can make good excuses, and it would be so wonderful.'

‘It might well be. But I don't like life in small doses – a teaspoonful three times a day. I don't imagine you do, either. It's bad for the system. When it happens it must be all or nothing, but with me it hasn't happened yet. Oh yes, you're charming, you're beautiful, you're passionate, all the things I like, but there's something missing, and neither of us can risk saying what it is. Maybe the pinch of shit in a vat of cream that makes the best yoghourt. Who knows?'

‘You do,' she said.

‘I know I do.' She went to make coffee. Of course he did. It had happened before, and if he thought it might never happen again he'd drive his car at a hundred into the nearest tree. She came back with a tray: milk, coffee, delicate cups, sugar in lumps, biscuits. ‘I hope your husband takes his time,' he said, ‘wandering around those marshes in his salt-and-pepper drag.'

Low in the armchair, her legs showed up well. ‘He'll be in for lunch.'

‘So you read that article?' He'd held the question back, not wanting to spoil their time together.

She put her glasses on, her brown eyes half closed behind them. ‘I did.'

Handley drank the scalding coffee in one gulp. ‘He made it all up. Oh well, I'll bump into him. Nobody's going to smear me from the safety of their newspapers and not get it back between the eyes. I'll rip that chuckle out of his blackheads.'

‘It was certainly a nasty piece,' she said, though laughing. He looked into her eyes, his narrow forehead and chiselnose, thin determined mouth, dark dry hair spread short and thick around his gypsy-like skull. She couldn't imagine where he came from, but hoped that in all his bitter sharpness he'd come straight to her and stay there. He was lost in the vast spaces of his own isolation, wandering between the heat and cold of a continental climate, unconnected to her or anyone in the world, and she wanted to take care of him and manage his life, though in this she would find her own destruction, wall against wall, because there was nothing in him that could ever be looked after. Filled with the latest in modern psychology, she thought he might have been too savagely weaned as a baby, that he mightn't have been fed regularly, or that he had somehow survived in spite of no care at all, not even nurtured by a wolf, that neither breast nor bottle were ever put to him unless he screamed down the whole sky first, stars, sun and moon, until the dust of hunger went into him and cut him off, the dust and flour of desolation making crusts that fed him through some form of bleak survival, placing him now beyond anyone but the she-wolf of the tundra, ice and sun, quartz crystals and pine-trees. Out of this came his painting, from a man in the middle of great earth-spaces who could not move one foot in any direction.

‘There's a bit of suicide in all of us,' he said, ‘but only the smallest bit in me.'

‘I think you do have a hard time living with the world,' she said. He had taken away her desire, and she was angry at herself for letting him, falling into his trap. She wanted to get him away from a wife who did not understand him, who was alien to such an artist. It may have been all right while he was unknown, but now it would strangle him. To live in the same way as an important and famous painter as you had while struggling to become one was disastrous. She could show him how to take his place in the world of great and talented men, and she thought herself quite capable of doing this.